At present, when a consumer desires to order reprints of a photographic print supplied by a print-making facility (or reprints of a "proof" i.e., a sample photograph) he or she will request certain sizes and quantities of reprints (the order information). The image to be printed is indicated by including the print itself, or by including an identifying number, with the order information. The identifying number is typically either the expected number of frames after a specially designated frame or is a number photographed with the image. Generally, a consumer may request various numbers and sizes of prints, but no provision is available to the consumer to tell the print-making facility what portion of the print to reprint nor how the intensity and color balance are to be adjusted.
The print making facility, when it receives a reprint order, must obtain the negatives of the photograph to be reprinted and present the negatives and print-making information to the print-making machine. In addition to quantity and size information, a modern automated print-making machine must receive position (cropping), density (intensity), and color balance information (the print-making machine's color co-efficients). In production systems, at least some of the information used by the print-making machine the first time the film is printed is placed permanently on the film. A typical production system permanently marks each frame with small holes encoding one of several different allowed combinations of quantity and size, one of several allowed croppings, and one of several allowed intensity levels. Color balance information is supplied separately and is not saved. Thus, an operator at the print-making plant must manually find the proper reel of film, mount the reel on a viewing machine, and find the proper frame by counting frames or comparing images until a match is found. Then the operator must make a subjective decision regarding color balance, without knowing what factors were used at the time of the original printing, how the density should be changed from the original printing, and what cropping changes should be made. The operator must also give the print-making machine specific consumer order information. Preparing the automated print-making machine to make reprints is, accordingly, labor intensive and prone to error, and does not fully accommodate the consumer's wishes about changes in density, color balance, or cropping.
Further, since the co-efficients used by the print-making machine are not saved, if an inspection of the reprints reveals a need for further modifications to the co-efficients and the making of another set of reprints, the operator must essentially reperform the entire process above-described.
The invention is a method that overcomes the above limitations and improves efficiency by eliminating much of the manual effort, provides an effective storage means for the information needed to make a reprint, and provides a means for the consumer to express his or her instructions about changes in density, color balance, or cropping of photographic prints.